Collected Stories

An Empty Threat

Ah, the South Seas. Maugham heroes and the young native girls, buxom and burgeoning at eighteen, so warm, so soft, so simple and oh, so willing. Ah, the South Seas and simple youth and the soothing, sun-tanned sirens of Samoa. Ah, for romance with the charming native girls, who never never never, it seems, give birth.

And ah, the daydreams in the cold, cold winter air. With all the car windows closed, Frederick Leary shriveled in the dry warm air spewed from the heater beside his knees, and the windshield misted over. With a window open, the cold air outside reached thin freezing fingers in to icily tweak his thin nose, and the vulnerable virgins of the South Pacific receded, waving, undulating, growing small and indistinct and far, far out of reach.

And Frederick Leary was only Frederick Leary after all. Manager of the local branch of the Bonham Bookstore chain. Well-read, through accretion. A husband, but not a father. Thirty-two, but not wealthy. College-trained, and distantly liked by his employees.

Irritated, annoyed, obscurely cheated, Frederick Leary turned into his driveway, and the car that had been following him pulled to the curb three houses away. Frederick pushed open the car door, which squeaked and cracked, and plodded through the snow to push up the garage door, an overhead, put in at great expense and a damned nuisance for all the cost. And the car that had been following him disgorged its occupant, a pale and indecisive youth, who shrunk inside his overcoat, who stood hatless in the gentle fall of snow, who chewed viciously upon a filter-tip cigarette and fondled the gun in his pocket, wondering if he had the nerve.

Returning to his car, Frederick drove it into the garage. Armed with a brown paper sack containing bread and milk, he left car and garage, pulled down the damned overhead behind him, and slogged through the new-fallen snow toward the back porch. And the youth threw away the soggy butt and shuffled away, to walk around the block, kicking at the drifts of snow, building up his courage for the act.

The back porch was screened, and the slamming of the screen door made an odd contrast to the snow collapsing from the sky. Frederick maneuvered the brown paper bag from hand to hand as he removed his overshoes, then pushed open the back door and walked into a blast of heat and bright yellow. The kitchen.

Louise had her back to him. She was doing something to a vegetable with a knife, and she didn’t bother to turn around. She already knew who it was. She said, “You’re home late.”

“Late shoppers,” Frederick told her, as he put the milk in the refrigerator and the bread in the bread-box. “You know Saturday. Particularly before Christmas. People buy books and give them to each other and nobody ever reads them. Didn’t get to close the store till twenty after six.”

“Supper in ten minutes,” Louise told him, still with her back to him, and brushed the chopped vegetable into a bowl.

Frederick walked through the house to the stairs and the foyer and the front door. He put his coat and hat in the closet and trotted upstairs to wash his hands, noticing for the thousandth time the places where the stair treads were coming loose. From his angle of vision, it seemed at times as though everything in the world were coming loose. Overhead doors, screen doors, stair treads. And the cold water faucet. He left the bathroom, refusing to listen to the measured drip of cold water behind him.

And outside, the youth completed his circuit of the block. He paused before the Leary house, looking this way and that, and a phrase came to him, from somewhere, from a conversation or television. “Calculated risk.” That’s what it was, and if he played it smart he could bring it off. He hurried along the driveway to the back of the house. He could feel his heart beating, and he touched the gun in his pocket for assurance. A calculated risk. He could do it.

On Saturday and Sunday, Frederick and Louise dined in the dining room, using the good silver, the good dishes and the good tablecloth. It was a habit that had once been an adventure. In silence they sat facing one another, in silence they fed, both aware that the good dishes were mostly chipped, the good silverware was just slightly tarnished. In pouring gravy on his boiled potatoes, Frederick spotted the tablecloth again. He looked guiltily at his wife, but she ate stolidly and silently, looking at the spot of gravy but not speaking. In the silence, the cold water dripped in the sink far away upstairs, and the tarnished silver clinked against the chipped dishes.

Stealthily, slowly, silently, the youth pushed open the screen door, sidled through, and gently closed it once again. He crept to the back door, his long thin fingers curled around the knob, soundlessly he opened the door and gained entrance to the house.

Louise looked up. “I feel a chill.”

Frederick said, “I feel fine.”

Louise said, “It’s gone now,” and looked back at her plate.

In the yellow warmth of the kitchen, the youth stood and dripped quietly upon the floor. He opened his overcoat, allowing warmth to spread closer against his body. The uncertainty crowded in on him, but he fought it away. He took the pistol from his overcoat pocket, feeling the metal cold against the skin of his hand. He stood there, tightly holding the gun until the metal grew warmer, until he was sure again, then slid forward through the hall to the dining room.

He stood in the doorway, looking at them, watching them eat, and neither looked up. He held the pistol aimed at the table, midway between the two of them, and when he was sure he could do it, he said, “Don’t move.”

Louise dropped her fork and pressed her palm against her mouth. Instinctively, she knew that it would be dangerous, perhaps fatal, for her to scream, and she held the scream back in her mouth with a taut and quivering hand.

Frederick pushed his chair back and half-rose, saying, “What—?” But then he saw the gun, and he subsided, flopping back into the chair with his mouth open and soundless.

Now that he had committed himself, the youth felt suddenly at case. It was a risk, a calculated risk. They were afraid of him, he could see it in their eyes, and now he was strong. “Just sit there,” he ordered. “Don’t make any noise. Do like I tell you, and you’ll be all right.”

Frederick closed his mouth and swallowed. He said, “What do you want?”

The youth pointed the pistol at Frederick. “I’m gonna send you on a little trip,” he said. “You’re gonna go back to that bookstore of yours, and you’re gonna open the safe and take out the money that’s in it. You got Friday night’s receipts in there and you got today’s receipts, all in there, maybe five or six grand. You’re gonna take the money out of the safe and put it in a paper bag. And then you’re gonna bring it right back here to me. I’ll be waiting right here for you. With your wife.” He looked at his watch. “It’s just about seven o’clock. I’ll give you till eight o’clock to get back here with the money from the store. If you don’t come back, I’ll kill your wife. If you call the cops and they come around, I’ll kill her for that, too.”

They stared at him, and he stared back at them. He looked at Frederick, and he said, “Do you believe me?”

“What?” Frederick started, as though he’d been asleep.

“Do you believe me? If you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll kill your wife.”

Frederick looked at the hard bright eyes of the youth, and he nodded. “I believe you.”

Now the youth was sure. It had worked, it was going to pay off. “You better get started,” he said. “You only got till eight o’clock.”

Frederick got slowly to his feet. Then he stopped. “What if I do what you tell me?” he asked. “Maybe you’ll kill the both of us anyway.”

The youth stiffened. This was the tough part. He knew that might occur to them, that he couldn’t let them live, that they could identify him, and he had to get over it, he had to make them believe a lie. “That’s the chance you got to take,” he said. He remembered his own thoughts, out in front of the house, and he smiled. “It’s what they call a calculated risk. Only I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think I’d kill anybody who did what I told them and who gave me five or six grand.”

“I’m not sure there’s that much there.”

“For your sake,” said the youth softly, “I hope there is.”

Frederick glanced at Louise. She was still staring at the youth, and her hand was still pressed against her mouth. He looked back at the youth again. “I’ll get my coat.”

The youth relaxed. It was done, the guy had gone for it. “You only got till eight o’clock,” he said. “You better hurry.”

“Hurry,” said Frederick. He turned and walked to the hallway closet and put on his coat and hat. He came back, paused to say to his wife, “I’ll be right back,” but the sentence sounded inane, said before the boy with the gun. “I’ll hurry back,” he said, but Louise still stared at the youth, and her arm was still bent and tense as she tightly gripped her mouth.

Frederick moved quickly through the house and out the back door. Automatically, he put on his overshoes, wet and cold against his ankles. He pushed open the screen door and hurried over to the garage. He had trouble opening the overhead door. He scraped between the side of the car and the concrete block wall of the garage, squeezed behind the wheel, backed the car out of the garage. Still automatically, he got out of the car and closed the overhead door again. And then the enormity of it hit him. Inside there was Louise, with a killer. A youth who would murder her, if Frederick didn’t get back in time.

He scurried back to the car, backed out to the street, turned and fled down the dark and silent, snow-covered street.

Hurry. He had to hurry. The windshield misted and he wiped impatiently at it, opened the window a bit and a touch of frost brushed his ear. The car was cold, but soon the heater was working full-strength, pumping warm dry air into the car.

His mind raced on, in a thousand directions at once, far ahead of the car. Way in the back of his mind, the Samoan virgins swayed and danced, motioning to him, beckoning to him. At the front of his mind loomed the face of the youth and the functional terror of the pistol. He would kill Louise, he really would.

He might kill her anyway. He might kill them both. Should he call the police? Should he stop and call the police? What was it the youth had said? Calculated risk. Calculated risk.

He turned right, turned left, skidded as he pressed too hard on the accelerator, barely missed a parked car and hurried on. His heart pounded, now because of the narrow escape from an accident. He could kill himself in the car, without any youths with pistols and sharp bitter faces.

Nonsense. Even at thirty miles an hour, bundled up in an overcoat the way he was, hitting a parked car wouldn’t kill him. It might knock him out, shake him up, but it wouldn’t kill him.

But it would kill Louise, because he wouldn’t get back in time.

Calculated risk. He slowed, thought of a life without Louise. The snow collapsed from the sky, and he thought of Samoa. What if he didn’t go back?

What if he didn’t go back?

But the boy might not kill her after all. And he would return, tomorrow or the next day, and she would be waiting for him, and she would know why he hadn’t come back. She would know that he had hoped the boy would kill her.

But what if he couldn’t go back?

Calculated risk. With sudden decision he accelerated, tearing down the empty residential street. He jammed his foot on the brakes, the tires slid on ice, he twisted the wheel, and the car hurtled into a telephone pole. The car crumpled against the pole with a squealing, jarring crash, but Frederick was lulled to unconsciousness by the sweet, sweet songs of the islands.

Travelers Far and Wee A Fable of Futurity

Roger turned right on Eighth Avenue from Fourteenth Street and drove uptown. Phil was asleep in the seat on his right. Roger readjusted himself behind the wheel, cut between two cabs, barely missed a truck, gradually worked the car — this year’s Oldsmobile, with the latest sanitary equipment — over to the left-hand side of the road. Eighth Avenue is one way, uptown, and Roger drove along the farthest lane over to the left. The lights were staggered, and Roger pushed the car at just under thirty miles an hour, clicking across each intersection just as the light snapped green.

He turned left on Forty Fifth Street, crossed Ninth Avenue, followed Forty Fifth Street down to the end, turned right and drove up the ramp to the Parkway. He speeded up to thirty five miles an hour, and glanced over at Phil. The poor guy was still asleep.

At One Hundred Seventy Fifth Street, Roger turned off and took the approach to the George Washington bridge. He drove across the bridge, rolled the window down, dropped a fifty cent piece into the toll taker’s hand. Rolling the window back up, he pulled out among the Jersey traffic.

Roger appeared to be about forty. Since it was a chill October day, he wore a tailored herringbone tweed topcoat, a gray hat and tan gloves. His face was full-fleshed, but not puffy. He didn’t wear glasses, and he looked like a successful businessman.

Phil, asleep on the seat beside him, wore approximately the same clothing. Although his face had its own individuality, it gave the same impression as did Roger’s. A man of means, an executive, a man who gives commands, a man of business and foresight and a good income.

Roger swooped the gray Olds halfway round a cloverleaf, swung gently and smoothly into a turn-off, barely touched the power brakes, and the car purringly decelerated as he drove into the tiny Jersey town.

The bank was on the main road of town. Roger turned into the driveway and parked behind the car waiting by the drive-in teller’s window. He took out checkbook and pen, wrote out a check to cash, and when his turn came, drove up to the window, rolled down the window at his side, and handed the check in to the teller. After a minute, the teller pushed a wad of greenbacks out to him. Roger took the money, tossed it carelessly on the seat between himself and Philip, rolled up the window, and drove around the modest brick bank building, out to the street, and turned back the way he had come.

Another fifty cents to the man at the tollgate, and Roger drove the car swiftly back across the bridge. This time, he took the “Local Streets” exit, turned north, drove until he came to the drive-in restaurant. He parked before the neon-coated, modernistic, glassed-in building, and waited until the chilly girl carhop came over to take his order. He asked for a hamburger, a cup of coffee, apple pie with ice cream. The carhop went away, and Roger picked up the cash that had been lying on the seat, counted it, shoved it into the glove compartment with the rest of the money there, except for one ten dollar bill, and put that bill on top of the dashboard.

He ate his meal, handed the ten dollars to the carhop, and said, “Keep the change.” He knew when he said it that it was a stupid thing to do, but he didn’t really care. He backed out to the highway, leaving the carhop stunned behind him, and headed back toward the city.

He glanced at his watch. Almost four thirty. He had to get downtown soon. He drove down Ninth Avenue, keeping to the left, turned onto Fourteenth Street, over to Lexington, turned uptown again, cutting off a cab that was coming the other way on Fourteenth Street, and held traffic up for quite a while during which he executed some complicated maneuvering, making a left turn into Seventeenth Street.

At Seventeenth and Fifth, he had to stop for a red light. The light turned green, but he sat there daydreaming. A car behind him honked, raucously, impatiently. Roger came to with a start, stalled the engine, got it going again, and turned right on Fifth.

The honking had awakened Phil. He sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes, and said, “What time is it?”

“Not quite five.”

“I might as well stay awake then.” Phil looked out at the traffic and the crowds of pedestrians. “Pretty crowded,” he said.

“Getting close to the Christmas shopping rush,” said Roger.

“That’s true. That’s going to be a real mess.”

“I’m not looking forward to it.”

They drove in silence for a while. They went into Central Park, circled it, came out on West Seventy Second, turned right, drove up to One Hundred Twenty Fifth, turned right again, over to Seventh Avenue, headed back downtown.

They had a terrible time getting through Times Square. A cab driver rolled his window down and cursed Roger in two languages. Roger maintained his dignity, stared straight ahead, drove on downtown.

As they turned into Fourteenth Street, Phil broke the silence. He waved out at all the traffic surrounding them, and said, “I wonder how many of them are like us.”

Roger shrugged. “More every day, I suppose.”

“Makes you stop and think.”

“It does that.”

They headed up Fifth Avenue again, amid the cabs and the groaning buses. As they crossed Forty Seventh, Phil said, “It’s six o’clock.”

“All right,” said Roger. “I’m rather tired.”

They were stopped by a red light at Forty Eighth. Roger put the emergency brake on and slid over to the right. Phil clambered over him and got behind the wheel. He didn’t get there before the light changed. A cab behind blatted its horn at them.

Phil released the emergency brake and started forward, slowly. The cab blatted again. Phil swerved erratically, barely missing a cab on his right. Roger relaxed in his seat, leaning against the right-hand door. “I cashed another check this afternoon,” he said.

“How much do we have left?”

“I don’t know. Millions.”

At Fifty Ninth, they were stuck behind a car trying to make a left turn. Phil laughed, bet he’s one of us.”

“More every day,” murmured Roger. His eyes were closed.

They continued uptown, turned left at Seventy Second, over to Ninth Avenue, turned downtown.

Phil watched the other traffic. His face was tired, lonely, wistful. He watched the pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalk, bumping into one another, cursing one another, straining to be first to the corner.

They crossed Fifty Ninth Street just after the light changed. A cab slammed on its brakes. Phil looked in the rear view mirror, watched the cab cross the intersection. He smiled, faintly. He said, “Do you suppose we’ll ever be able to get out of the car?”

But Roger didn’t answer. He was asleep.

Anatomy of an Anatomy

It was on a Thursday, just at four in the afternoon, when Mrs. Aileen Kelly saw the arm in the incinerator. As she told the detective who came in answer to her frantic phone call, “I opened the ramp, to put my dag of rubbish in, and plop it fell on the ramp.”

“An arm,” said the detective, who had introduced himself as Sean Ryan.

Mrs. Kelly nodded emphatically. “I saw the fingers,” she said. “Curved, like they was beckoning to me.”

“I see.” Detective Ryan made a mark or two in his notebook. “And then what?” he asked.

“Well, I jumped with fright. Anybody would, seeing a thing like that. And the ramp door shut, and when I opened it to look in again, the arm had fallen on down to the incinerator.”

“I see,” said Ryan again. He heaved himself to his feet, a short and stocky man with a lined face and thinning gray hair. “Maybe we ought to take a look at this incinerator,” he said.

“It’s just out in the hall.”

Mrs. Kelly led the way. She was a short and slightly stout lady of fifty-six, five years a widow. Her late Bertram’s tavern, half a block away at the corner of 46th Street and 9th Avenue, now belonged to her. After Bertram’s passing, she had hired a bartender-manager, and for the last five years had continued to live on in this four-room apartment on 46th Street, where she had spent most of her married life with Bertram.

The incinerator door was across the hall from Mrs. Kelly’s apartment. She opened this door and pointed to the foot-square inner ramp door. “That’s it,” she told the detective.

Ryan opened the ramp door and peered inside. “Pretty dark in there,” he commented.

“Yes, it is.”

“How tail’s this building, Mrs. Kelly?”

“Ten stories.”

“And we’re on the sixth,” he said. “Four stories up to the roof, and the chimney up there is your only source of light.”

“Well,” she said, a trifle defensively, “there’s the hall light, too.”

“Not when you’re in front of it like this.” He stooped to peer inside the ramp door again. “Don’t see any stains on the bricks,” he said.

“Well, it was only stuck for just a second.”

Ryan frowned and closed the ramp door. “You only saw this arm for a second,” he said, and it was plain he was doubting Mrs. Kelly’s story.

“That was enough, believe you me,” she told him.

“Mmmm. May I ask, do you wear glasses?”

“Just for reading.”

“So you didn’t have them on when you saw this arm.”

“I did see it. Mister Detective Ryan,” she snapped, “and it was an arm.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He opened the ramp door again, stuck his arm in. “Incinerator’s on,” he said. “I can feel the heat.”

“It’s always on in the afternoon, three till six.”

Ryan dragged an old turnip watch from his change pocket. “Quarter after five,” he said.

“Took you an hour or more to come here,” she reminded him. She didn’t like this Detective Ryan, who so obviously didn’t believe a word she was saying. For one thing, his hat needed blocking. For another, the sleeves of his gray topcoat were frayed. And for a third thing, he was wearing the most horrible orange necktie Mrs. Kelly had ever seen.

“Arm’d be all burned up by now,” he said, musingly, “if it was an arm.”

“It was an arm,” she said dangerously.

“Mmmm.” He had the most infuriating habit of neither agreeing nor disagreeing, just saying, “Mmmmm.” To which he added, “Shall we go on back to your living room?”

Furious, Mrs. Kelly marched back into her apartment and sat on the flower-pattern sofa, while Detective Ryan settled himself in Bertram’s old chair, across the room.

“Now, Mrs. Kelly,” he said, once he was seated, “I’m not doubting your sincerity for a minute, believe me. I’m sure you saw what you thought was an arm.”

“It was an arm.”

“Ail right,” he said. “It was an arm. Now, that would mean somebody upstairs had murdered somebody else, chopped the body up, and was getting rid of the pieces into the incinerator. Right?”

“Well, of course. That’s obviously what’s happening. And instead of doing something about it, you’re sitting here—”

“Now,” he said interrupting her smoothly, “you told me you were so startled by the arm you dropped your bag of rubbish, and had to pick it all up again. So you stayed at the incinerator door a couple minutes after you saw the arm. And you opened the door twice more. Once to see if the arm was still there, and once to throw your own bag of rubbish away.”

“And so?” she demanded.

“Did you see or hear any more pieces going by?”

She frowned. “No. Just the arm.” At the expression on his face, she added, “Well, isn’t that enough?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. What’s our murderer planning to do with the rest of the body?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know. Could — could be that that arm was the last part to go down. He’d thrown down all the rest of it earlier.”

“Could be, Mrs. Kelly,” Ryan said. “But frankly, I think you made an honest mistake. What you thought was an arm was really something else. Maybe a rolled-up newspaper.”

“I tell you, I saw the fingers!”

Ryan sighed, and got to his feet. “I tell you what, Mrs. Kelly,” he said. “What you got here isn’t enough for us to go on. But if a report comes in on somebody being missing in this building, that would kind of corroborate your story. If somebody’s been murdered, he or she will be reported missing before long, and—”

“It was a woman,” said Mrs. Kelly. “I saw the long fingernails.”

Ryan frowned again. “You saw long fingernails,” he asked, “in just a couple of seconds, in that dim incinerator shaft and without your glasses on?”

“I saw what I saw,” she insisted, “and I only need my glasses for reading.”

“Well,” said Ryan. He stood there, fidgeting with that awful crushed hat, obviously wanting to be done and away. “If we get word on anybody missing,” he said again.

Mrs. Kelly glared at him as he left. He didn’t believe her; he thought she was nothing but a foolish old woman with bad eyes. She could hear him now, once he got back to his precinct house: “Nothing to it, just an old crank not wearing her glasses.”

And then he was gone, and she was alone. And her irritated anger gradually gave way to something very close to fear. She looked up at the ceiling. Somewhere on the four floors above, someone had murdered a woman, and chopped her up, and thrown her forearm down the incinerator shaft. Mrs. Kelly looked up, realizing how close that terrible murderer was, and that there was to be no help from the police, and she shivered.

The next afternoon, that was a Friday, at just around four o’clock, Mrs. Kelly once more brought her rubbish bag to the incinerator. This wasn’t a coincidence. Having lived alone for five years, Mrs. Kelly had developed routines and habits of living that carried her smoothly through her solitary days. And at four o’clock each afternoon, she threw the rubbish away.

On this Friday afternoon, very much aware of the murderer lurking somewhere in the building, she peeked out into the hall before hurrying across to the incinerator door. Then she quickly dumped the rubbish, but someone had thrown something greasy away recently, and a piece of paper stuck to the ramp. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she reached in and freed it.

That’s when it happened again. This time, it was an upper arm, elbow to shoulder, and it didn’t pause at the sixth floor. It sailed right on by, elbow foremost, and left Mrs. Kelly staring at the blank brick walls of the shaft.

She was back in her own living room, the door locked and the chain attached, before she had time to think. And when she recovered sufficiently, she decided at once to call that smarty Detective Sean Ryan, because now she knew why there had only been the forearm disposed of yesterday.

Of course. The murderer was afraid to drop all of the body at once. It would take him half an hour or more, and someone on a lower floor would be bound to see something in that time. Besides, he might be afraid the whole body wouldn’t burn in just one day.

That’s why he dropped just one piece, each afternoon at four. The incinerator had been burning for an hour by that time, and so would be nice and hot. And it would have two more hours to burn before it was turned off.

Ah-hah, Detective Ryan, she thought, and reached for the phone. But then she stopped, her hand an inch from the phone, suddenly knowing exactly what Detective Ryan would have to say. “More arms, Mrs. Kelly? And this one didn’t even stop, just whizzed right by? Do you know how fast a falling arm would go, Mrs. Kelly?”

No. Mrs. Kelly wasn’t going to go through another humiliating interview like the one yesterday.

But what could she do? A murder had been committed, and what could she do if she couldn’t even call the police?

She fretted and fumed, half-afraid and half-annoyed, and then she remembered something Detective Ryan had said yesterday. Corroboration, that’s what he had said. Proof of murder, proof someone was missing from this building.

Very well, corroboration he would get. And then he’d have to swallow those smart-alecky remarks of his. How fast does a falling arm go indeed!

All she had to do was find proof.

Almost a full week went by, and no proof. Every afternoon at four, Mrs. Kelly stood by the incinerator door and in growing frustration watched another part sail by. Saturday, the left forearm. Sunday, the left upper arm. Monday, right foot, knee to toes. Tuesday, right leg, hip to knee. Lower half of the torso on Wednesday. Left foot, knee to toes on Thursday.

And Mrs. Kelly knew she had only three days left. The upper half of the torso, the left leg, and the head.

For the first time in her life, Mrs. Kelly disliked the automatic privacy that was a part of living in a New York City apartment. Twenty-seven years she had lived in this building, and she didn’t know a soul here, except for the superintendent on the first floor. But the people in the sixteen apartments on the four floors above her were total strangers. She could watch the front door forever, and never know who was missing.

On Tuesday (right leg), it occurred to her to watch the mailboxes. It seemed to her that this murderer, whoever he was, would be staying in his apartment as much as possible until the body had been completely eliminated. There was a possibility he wouldn’t even leave to pick up his mail. If there were a stuffed mailbox, it might be the clue she needed.

There wasn’t a stuffed mailbox.

On Wednesday (lower half of the torso), she thought to go back to the mailboxes again, this time to get the names of the occupants of the sixteen apartments up above. That afternoon, clutching her list, she watched the piece go by, and repaired furiously to her apartment.

It was all that Detective Sean Ryan’s fault, that rumpled man. He must be a widower, or a bachelor. No woman would let her man out of the house as rumpled as all that. Nor wearing a necktie as horrible as that wide orange thing Detective Ryan had had around his neck.

Not that it made any difference. Mrs. Kelly had had trouble enough for one lifetime with Bertram, rest his soul. Housebreaking a man was a life’s work, and a woman would be a fool to try to do the job on two men, one right after the other. And Mrs. Aileen Kelly was certainly no fool.

Though she was beginning to feel very much like a fool, as day after day the pieces of that poor murdered woman fell down the incinerator shaft, and Mrs. Kelly still without a shred of proof.

Thursday, she considered the possibility of hiding in a hallway, where she could watch the incinerator door. According to the way the pieces were falling, there were four parts left. If Mrs. Kelly were to spend each of the four days hidden in the hallway on each of the four floors above, sooner or later she would catch the murderer red-handed.

But, how to hide in the hallways? They were all bare and empty, without a single hiding place.

Except, perhaps, the elevator.

Of course, of course, the elevator. She rushed out of her apartment, got into the elevator, and peered through the round porthole in the elevator door. By pressing her nose against the metal of the door and peeking far to the left, she could just barely catch a glimpse of the incinerator door. It would work.

Accordingly, she was in the elevator at five of four, and pushing the button marked 7. The elevator rose one flight and stopped. Mrs. Kelly took up her position, peering out at the incinerator door, and so she stood for three minutes.

Then the elevator started with a jerk, cracking Mrs. Kelly smartly across the nose, and purred down its shaft, stopping at the fourth floor. Someone else had called it.

Furious, Mrs. Kelly glared at the overcoat-bundled man who stepped aboard at the fourth floor and pushed the button marked 1.

On the first floor, the overcoated man left the building, while Mrs. Kelly dashed to the incinerator door, opened it, opened the ramp, and watched the left foot go falling by, to land in the midst of the flames below.

That did it for fair. There were only three days left now, and four floors to check. And if she didn’t find out who the murderer was before Sunday, he would have disposed of the body completely, and there wouldn’t be a shred of proof. Mrs. Kelly stormed back to the elevator, thinking, “Three days and four floors. Three days and four floors.”

And the roof.

She stopped in her tracks. The roof. The top of the incinerator shaft was up there, covered only by a wire grating. It wouldn’t be hard to bend that grating back, and drop something down the shaft.

Which meant it didn’t have to be somebody in this building at all. It could be someone from almost anywhere on the block, coming across the roofs to drop the evidence as far from home as possible.

Well, there was a way to find out about that. It had snowed all day yesterday and last night, but it hadn’t snowed today. The flat roof would have a nice thick layer of snow on it. If anyone had come across it to the incinerator shaft, he would have had to leave tracks.

Getting into the elevator, she pushed the button for the tenth floor, and waited impatiently as the elevator rose to the top of the building. Then she mounted the flight of stairs to the roof door, unbent the wire twisted around the catch, and stepped out.

She had been in too much of a hurry to stop and dress properly for the outdoors. It was cold and windy up on the roof, and the snow was ankle-deep. Mrs. Kelly turned the collar of her housecoat up and held the lapels closed against her throat. Her old scuffy slippers were no protection against the snow.

She hurried off to the right, to the incinerator chimney, circled it, and found no footprints beyond her own.

So, she’d wasted her time, frozen half to death and ruined her slippers, and all for nothing.

No, not for nothing after all. Now she knew for sure the murderer was somewhere in this building.

Friday morning, Mrs. Kelly awoke with a snuffly head cold and a steadily increasing irritation. She was furious at Detective Ryan for making her do his work for him. She was enraged at the terrible creature upstairs, who’d started this whole thing in the first place. And she was exasperated with herself, for being such a complete failure.

She spent the day sipping tea liberally laced with lemon juice, and at four hobbled out to the incinerator to watch the upper half of the torso bump by. Then, snuffly and miserable, she went back to bed.

On Saturday, the cold was just as bad, and her irritation was worse. She sat and looked at her list of sixteen names, and searched desperately for a way to find out which one of them was a murderer.

Of course, she could simply call Detective Ryan and have him come over at four o’clock, to watch the piece of body fall down the incinerator shaft. She could do that, but she wouldn’t. When she called Detective Ryan, it would be because she had found the murderer.

Besides, he probably wouldn’t even come.

So she glared at the list of names. A silly thought occurred to her. She could look up the phone numbers of all these people, and say, “Excuse me, have you been dropping a body down the incinerator?”

Well, come to think of it, why not? It was a woman’s body, which probably meant it was somebody’s wife. With her husband the murderer. Most of the people in this building were middle-aged or better, couples whose children had grown up and gone their separate ways years ago. So far as she knew, there were no large families in the building at all.

It would have to be an apartment in which there were only two people. The murderer wouldn’t be able to hide the dead body from someone living in the same apartment.

So maybe the telephone would be useful after all. She could call each apartment. If a woman answered she would say she had a wrong number. If a man answered, she would ask for his wife. The apartment without a woman would be the logical suspect.

With a definite plan at last, she ignored her stuffed nose and sat down beside the telephone to look up the phone numbers of her sixteen suspects, and start her calls.

Two of the sixteen had no phone numbers listed. Well, if the other fourteen produced nothing certain, she would have to think of something else for those two. And she was suddenly convinced that she would be able to think of something when the time came, with no trouble at all. She was suddenly oozing with confidence.

She started phoning shortly after five. Eight of the fourteen answered, five times a woman’s voice and three times a man’s voice. Mrs. Kelly apologized to the women for calling a wrong number, and asked each man who answered, “Is the Missus at home, please?” Twice, the men answered, “Just a second,” and Mrs. Kelly had to apologize to the women who came on the line. The third time, the man said, “She’s out shopping right now. Could I take a message for her?”

“I’ll call back later,” said Mrs. Kelly quickly. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, probably,” said the man.

She waited an hour before calling that number again, and she was so nervous she actually did dial a wrong number to begin with. Because this might be the end of the search. If the wife still wasn’t home—

She was. Mrs. Kelly, disappointed, made the eighth wrong-number apology, and crossed the eighth name off her list.

She tried the remaining six numbers later in the evening, and only once found someone at home. A woman. Mrs. Kelly crossed the ninth name off the list.

She tried the five remaining numbers shortly after ten that night, but none of them answered. Deciding to try again in the morning, she set the alarm for eight o’clock and went to bed, where she slept uneasily, dreaming of bodies falling from endless blackness.

The upper half of the torso had fallen on Friday.

Mrs. Kelly’s cold was worse again on Saturday. She forced herself to the telephone around noon, managed to lower the number of suspects from five to three, then gave up and went back to bed, rousing only to watch the left leg plummet by at four o’clock.

Only the head remained.

Sunday morning, the cold was gone. Not even a sniffle remained. Mrs. Kelly got up early, went to eight o’clock Mass, and hurried back home through the January cold and the slippery streets to have breakfast and make more phone calls.

There were three numbers left. One of them was answered, by a disgruntled man who said his wife was asleep, but the other two still didn’t respond. She tried again at eleven, and this time the disgruntled man turned her over to his wife. Two numbers left.

Her second call was answered by a man, and Mrs. Kelly said, “Hello. Is the Missus at home?”

“Who’s this?” snapped the man. His voice was suspicious and hoarse, and Mrs. Kelly felt the leaping of hope within her breast.

“This is Annie Tyrrell,” she said, giving the first name to come to her mind, which happened to have been her mother’s maiden name.

“The wife ain’t here,” said the man. There was a pause, and he added, “She’s gone out of town. Visiting her mother. Gone to Nebraska.”

“Oh, dear me,” said Mrs. Kelly, hoping she was doing a creditable job of acting. “How long ago did she leave?”

“Wednesday before last,” said the man. “Won’t be back for a month or two.”

“Could you give me her address in Nebraska?” Mrs. Kelly asked. “I could drop her a note,” she explained.

The man hesitated. “Don’t have it right handy,” he said, finally. Then, all at once, he said, “Who’d you say this was?”

For a frantic second, Mrs. Kelly couldn’t remember what name she had given, and then it came back to her. “Annie Tyrrell,” she said.

“I don’t think I know you,” said the man suspiciously. “Where you know my wife from?”

“Oh, we — uh — we met in the supermarket.”

“Is that right?” he sounded more suspicious than ever. “I tell you what,” he said. “You give me your number. I don’t have the wife’s address right handy, but I can look it up and call you back.”

“Well, uh—” Mrs. Kelly thought frantically. She didn’t know what to do. If she gave him her own number, he might be able to check it and find out who she really was. But if she gave him some other number, he might call back and find out there wasn’t any Annie Tyrrell, and then he’d know for sure that someone suspected him.

He broke into her thoughts, saying “Say, who is this, anyway? What’s my wife’s first name?”

“What?”

“I asked you what’s my wife’s first name,” he repeated.

“Well,” she said, forcing a little laugh that sounded patently false even to her, “whatever on earth for? Don’t you even know your own wife’s first name?”

“I do,” he said. “But do you?”

Suddenly terrified, Mrs. Kelly hung up without another word, and sat staring at the telephone. It had been him! The sound of his voice, the suspicious way he had acted. It had been him! She looked at his name on her list. Andrew Shaw, apartment 8B, two floors up, directly over her apartment.

Andrew Shaw. He was the killer, and now he knew that someone suspected him. It wouldn’t take him long to realize the call had come from someone in this building, someone who must have seen the evidence in the incinerator shaft.

He would be searching for her now, and she didn’t know how long it would take him to find her. He might be much more resourceful than she; it might not take him as long as a week to find and silence the person who was threatening him.

Pride was pride, but foolishness was something else again. It was time to call Detective Ryan. She had the murderer’s name for him now, and the head of the murdered woman hadn’t yet been disposed of. It was time for Detective Sean Ryan to take over.

Thoroughly frightened, Mrs. Kelly fumbled through the phone book until she found the police station number, and had it half-dialed when she remembered it was Sunday. Of course, some policemen were at work on Sundays, but not necessarily Sean Ryan. Well, if he wasn’t working today, some other policeman would have to do. Though she did hope it would be Sean Ryan. Simply to see the expression on his face when he saw she’d been right all along, of course.

When the bored voice said, “Sixteenth Precinct,” Mrs. Kelly said, “I’d like to speak to Detective Ryan, please. Detective Sean Ryan.”

“Just one moment, please,” said the voice. Mrs. Kelly waited for a moment that seemed to go on forever, and then the same voice came back and said, “He’s off to eleven o’clock Mass now, ma’am. Be back in about an hour. Want to leave a message?”

She knew she should settle for another policeman, that this was no time for delays, but she found herself saying, “Would you ask him to call Mrs. Aileen Kelly, please? The number is CIrcle 5-9970.”

She had to spell her first name for him, and added, “Would you tell him it’s important, and to call right away, the minute he gets there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you very much.”

And then she had nothing to do but wait. And wait. And look at the ceiling.

He didn’t call till two-thirty, and by then Mrs. Kelly was frantic. In the first place, she was afraid her phone call to Mister Andrew Shaw might have him worried about maintaining his four o’clock schedule. He might decide to get rid of the head at three o’clock, when the incinerator first went on, and then there wouldn’t be any more evidence. And in the second place she was terrified that he would find her right away, that any moment he would be knocking on the front door.

Half a dozen times, she almost called the police again, but every time she told herself that he must call in a minute or two. And when he finally did call, at two-thirty, he stepped directly into a tongue-lashing.

“You were supposed to call me directly after you got back to the precinct house,” she told him. “Directly after Mass.”

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m a busy man,” he said defensively. “I’ve just this minute got back to the station. I had some other calls to make.”

“Well, you hotfoot it over here this instant. Mister Detective Ryan,” she snapped. “I’ve got your murderer for you, but with all your shilly-shallying around, he’s liable to get off scot-free yet. They turn the incinerator on at three o’clock, you know.”

“It’s this business about the arm again, is it?”

“It’s about the whole body this time,” she informed him. “And there’s nothing left of it but the head. Now, you get over here before even that is gone.”

She heard him sigh, and then he said, “Right, Mrs. Kelly. I’ll be right over.”

It was then twenty to three. In twenty minutes, the incinerator would go on. She was positive by now that he would change his pattern, that he would get rid of the head just as soon as ever he could. And that would be in twenty minutes.

And then it was fifteen minutes, and ten minutes and five minutes, and still Ryan didn’t come, though the precinct house was only a block and a half away, up on 47th Street.

At two minutes to three, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She peered out the peekhole at the hall, and saw that it was empty. Carefully and silently, she unlocked the door and crept down the hall to the incinerator. She opened it and stood staring in at the gray brick walls of the shaft, expecting any second to see the head go sailing by.

And still Ryan didn’t come.

At three o’clock on the dot, she heard a thump from above, and knew it was the head. Without stopping to think, she thrust her arm into the shaft in a frantic attempt to grab it and save it for evidence. With her arm stretched out like that, she couldn’t see into the shaft, but she felt the head when it landed on her wrist a second later. It was freezing cold, so he’d been keeping it in a home freezer all this time, and it was held by her wrist and a wall of the incinerator.

It was also sticky, and Mrs. Kelly’s imagination suddenly gave her a vivid image of exactly what she was touching. She gave a shriek, pulled her arm back, and the head went bumping down the shaft to the fire far below.

At that moment, the elevator door slid open and Detective Ryan appeared.

She glared at him for a speechless second, then shook her fist in fury. “Now you come, do you? Now, when it’s too late and the poor woman’s head is burned to a crisp and that Andrew Shaw is free as a bird, now you come!”

He stared at her in amazement, and she shook her fist at him. “The last of the evidence,” she cried, “Gone, burned to a crisp, because of—”

For the first time, she noticed the fist she was shaking. It was red, ribboned red, and as she looked, the cold ribbon spread down her arm, and she knew it was the poor woman’s blood.

“There’s your evidence!” she cried, raising her hand to him, and fell over in a faint.

When she awoke, on the sofa in her living room. Detective Ryan was sitting awkwardly on a kitchen chair beside her. “Are you all right now?” he asked her.

“Did you get him?” she asked right back.

He nodded. A woman whom Mrs. Kelly recognized as her across-the-hall neighbor, though she didn’t know her name, came from the direction of the kitchen and handed Mrs. Kelly a steaming cup of tea.

She sat up, still shaky, and realized thankfully that someone had washed her hand while she’d been in her faint.

“We got him,” said Detective Ryan. “The incinerator had just gone on, and we got it turned off in time, so the evidence wasn’t destroyed after all. And we got him stepping out of the elevator, his suitcase all packed. And he talked enough.”

“Well, good,” said Mrs. Kelly, and she sipped triumphantly at the tea.

“Now,” said Ryan, his tone changing, “I believe I have a bone to pick with you, Mrs. Kelly.”

She frowned, “Do you, now?”

“All week long,” he said, “you’ve been watching pieces of body being disposed of, and not once did you call the police.”

“I did call the police,” she reminded him. “A smarty-pants detective named Ryan came and refused to believe me. Called me a foolish old woman.”

“I never did!” he said, shocked and outraged.

“You as much as did, and that’s the same thing.”

“You should have called again,” he insisted, “once you’d figured out his schedule.”

“Why should I?” she demanded. “I called you once, and you laughed at me. And when I finally did call you again, you lollygaggled around and showed up late anyway.”

He shook his head. “You’re a very foolhardy woman, Mrs. Kelly,” he said. “You have too much pride.”

“I solved the case for you,” she told him.

“You took totally unnecessary chances,” he said sternly.

“If you’re going to give me a sermon,” she told him, “you’d better get a more comfortable chair.”

“You don’t seem to realize,” he began, then shook his head. “You need someone to look out for you.” And he launched into his sermon.

Mrs. Kelly sat, not really listening, nodding from time to time. She noticed he was wearing that horrible orange tie again. In a bit, when the sermon was over and she felt less shaky, she’d go on out to the bedroom. She still had most of Bertram’s clothes, his neckties included. There had to be one there to go with that brown suit of Ryan’s.

That orange thing was going down the incinerator, it was.

Man of Action

One of the very finest ways to louse up someone who is determined but unwise is to give him just exactly what he thinks he wants…

When Roger awoke, the calendar-clock beside his bed told him it was August 14, 2138.

“That’s odd.” mused Roger. “It was December 3, 1960 when I went to sleep.” He frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Or was it December 4th?”

“December 3rd,” said a voice.

Roger looked around and saw that he was alone in the room. “I don’t think I said that,” he told himself. “My voice isn’t that deep.”

He waited, but the voice didn’t say anything.

Roger sat up and studied the room. He’d never seen it before, he was quite sure of that. The walls were of a peculiarly bright golden hue that Roger would never have chosen for a bedroom, and the floor seemed to be of black linoleum. Or something like linoleum. He stooped and touched the polished black smoothness of the floor, and it felt… well, non-linoleum-like. “It certainly isn’t linoleum,” said Roger. “What in the world is it?”

“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.

Roger spun around. The voice, this time, had come from behind him. But still he was alone in the room. “Who said that?” he demanded.

“I did,” said the voice, from somewhere straight ahead.

“Where are you?” asked Roger, squinting a trifle.

“Here,” said the voice.

“Who are you, then?”

“Your mechanical.”

Roger blinked. “My mechanical what?”

“Uh,” said the voice. “Squawk. Brrrp-brrrp, crah! I am your mechanical.” Except for the ‘crah!’, all of the sounds and words had been delivered with the same unemotional monotone that had characterized the voice from the beginning. The ‘crah’ was different only in that it was somewhat louder and a bit higher in pitch.

“My mechanical,” echoed Roger. He frowned and folded his arms and blinked at the blank golden wall. And it was a blank wall, a very blank wall. All the walls were blank, save for a door in the wall to Roger’s right and a window in the wall to his left. The door was silver and knobless, and in conjunction with the golden walls it made Roger think of money. And money made him think of income and outgo, which made him think of work, which made him remember that he had gone to sleep on December 3, 1960 and had awakened — if the calendar-clock were to be believed — on August 14, 2138, in a room utterly different from his own bedroom, and in a bed as strange as any he had ever seen.

Stranger, come to think of it. It was the first bed he’d ever seen hover eighteen inches above the floor.

Which made him think of the voice, for some reason, and he said, petulantly, “My mechanical what?”

“Machine?” said the voice, with a definite air of hesitant doubt.

“My mechanical machine?” Roger looked again at the blank wall. “A robot, you mean?”

“Not precisely,” said the voice.

“Where’s your grid?” asked Roger.

“Meaning doubtful,” said the voice. “Grid nonexistent.”

“Is it really August 14, 2138?” asked Roger, struck suddenly by the idea that the calendar-clock might be wrong. Must be wrong. 1960 to 2138 was — he couldn’t figure it exactly, but it was over a hundred years. Well over a hundred years.

“The date is correct,” said the voice.

“Where am I, exactly?” asked Roger.

“In this room,” said the voice.

“I mean, geographically,” said Roger, annoyed at the infuriating habit of the voice of taking every question at its most literal level of meaning.

“New York,” said the voice, “North-Eastern Union, North America, Earth, Solar Sys—”

“Enough! Thank you very much, New York was enough. That was where I went to sleep last night. Or whenever it was. At least that hasn’t changed.” Roger walked over to the window and looked out, to discover that it had changed after all. The New York outside his window was far different from the New York outside his Greenwich Village window at home, back in 1960. This New York consisted almost entirely of straight vertical lines and elliptical diagonal lines, and almost everything was the same gold as the room walls or the same silver as the room door or the same black as the room floor, “Is that real gold?” asked Roger, then hurriedly added, “Wait! I mean the metal, not the color.”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger sighed with irritation. “What is it, then?” he asked. “Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice. “And the silver?”

“Yes.”

“And the black.”

There was no answer, and Roger wondered what had gone wrong until he realized he’d phrased that last remark as a statement rather than a question. The voice, he now understood, responded only to direct questions.

It was time for the most direct question of all. “What’s going on here?” asked Roger.

“You are asking questions,” said the voice, “and I am answering them.”

“That isn’t what I mean,” wailed Roger. “I mean… I mean— What am I doing here?”

“You are asking questions,” said the voice.

Yelping, Roger snatched up the calendar-clock to hurl it, and stood posed, off-balance, rocking a bit. There wasn’t anything to hurl at, nothing but the four golden walls, the black floor, the silver door, the hovering bed, the kidney-shaped bedside table and the view out of the window. That last was good enough for Roger. He hurled the calendar-clock out the window.

The window hurled it right back. The calendar-clock bounced off the window, passed Roger at waist-level, and clashed to the floor, where it slid along until it brought up against the far wall, near the door.

Roger gaped in all directions at once, and finally moved forward to gingerly touch the window. It looked like glass, and it felt like glass, but it certainly hadn’t reacted like glass.

“What in the world is it?” he wondered.

“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.

Roger jumped. He hadn’t realized he’d asked that question aloud. It was a habit of his, he knew, talking to himself. It was because his three vocations — interior decorating, set designing and department store window display designing — were all essentially solitary occupations. Himself over a drawing board or prowling a presently-shabby living room or pinning a dress to a mannequin, always more or less alone, thinking and deciding and planning, and quite naturally he had developed the habit of voicing his thoughts aloud. Things like, “Red over that fireplace, I should think,” or, “Never do to put an entrance on that side,” or, “Black crepe hangings around the wedding gown would be chic.”

Which brought to mind, once again, the fact that it was morning and Roger should definitely be on his way to work. He was probably late already, and the manager at Wellman’s Department Store was a terror for punctuality.

“Of course I’m late,” he said aloud, struck by the incongruity of it all. “I’m well over a hundred years late.”

He whirled on the wall from which the voice seemed to emanate. “I want to know what’s going on,” he said angrily. “I want to know how I got here and why and when I can expect to go back and just exactly what’s going on here. And I want to know now, this minute.”

Ultimatum delivered, Roger folded his arms and waited, glaring at the wall. But the voice made no sound, and Roger remembered again that he had to ask his questions so that they sounded like questions, or the voice would simply ignore him. “All right,” he said, disgusted. “All right, then. We’ll play it your way. Question number one: How did I get here?”

“You were brought here,” said the voice.

“How?”

“Answer unavailable, involving theoretical physics beyond your mechanical’s understanding.”

“I do not have mechanical understanding,” said Roger. “Oh, wait. You mean you. Well. Was it a time machine?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“You could have simply said that in the first place,” said Roger reproachfully. “I didn’t want to know the mechanics of the thing. All right, question number two. Who brought me here?”

The voice began to reel off syllables, most of them containing an M or an L or an N, with either A or O for the vowel. A dozen or more of these syllables had poured out before Roger cried, “Stop! Halt! What is that, French?”

“Names,” said the voice.

It took Roger a minute to turn that answer into sense, and then he realized that the voice, literal as ever, had been giving him the names of the men who had built or operated or directed the operation of the time machine that had whisked him here from December 3, 1960.

December 3, 1960. “My Christmas windows!” wailed Roger all at once, remembering what he’d been due to work on today, at Wellman’s Department Store.

“It isn’t fair!” cried Roger. “I never did anything to anybody in 2138. I don’t even know anybody in 2138. And I certainly don’t have any descendants in 2138. I’m not married, and I have no intention of ever becoming married.” A doubt crossed his mind, and he frowned at the wail. “I don’t get married, do I?” he asked.

“Restricted,” said the voice.

Roger blinked. “Restricted? What do you mean, restricted?”

“Word in use in mid-Twentieth Century,” said the voice. “Meaning: applies to facts known to elite but hidden from masses. Usage here adaptation for present needs.”

The voice had an annoying habit, every once in a while, of talking like a telegram, which meant that Roger had to let the words circle around in his head two or three times, while inserting verbs and pronouns and modifiers, until he figured out what the message had been.

The message this time was humiliating. “Do you mean to say,” Roger demanded, “that you are the elite and I am the masses? Or should I say the mass?”

“Usage here,” said the voice, “adaption for present needs.”

“What that means,” snapped Roger, “is that you won’t tell me whether I ever get married or not. Do I have some smart-Aleck great-grandson playing a trick on his old great-granddad, is that it?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well! A straight answer at last. Then maybe you’ll tell me what I am here for.” Roger paused, grimaced, rephrased the last sentence and said, “What am I here for?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Well, there must be some reason, after all,” said Roger, exasperated. “Is there a reason?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“But you won’t tell me. I mean, you won’t tell me, will you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“That’s what I thought,” said Roger. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared gloomily at his pajama-clad knees. The silence lengthened. “I wonder what happens now,” he said to his knees. He looked up at the wall. “What happens now?”

“Whatever you want,” said the voice.

“Then I go right back to December 3, 1960,” said Roger promptly. He stretched out on the bed, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes. “Five in the morning, I think,” he said. “I should like a little more sleep.”

He waited with his eyes closed until he had counted to twenty-five, and then he opened his eyes and looked at a silver ceiling and a golden wall. He hadn’t noticed before that the ceiling was silver. Actually, it blended—

All at once, he sat up and shouted, “Hey!” He glared at the wall. “I thought you said whatever I wanted to happen would happen. Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Well, then,” said Roger. “I want to go home. Can’t I go home?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Now?”

“No,” said the voice.

“This is infuriating,” cried Roger. He leaped from the bed and advanced on the wall where the voice came from. “I’m going to find you,” he muttered, “and rip out your wiring. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger growled. The voice was so blatantly, blandly monotonous, so smug and self-assured. It was more than infuriating, it was — enraging. Roger tapped on the wall, trying to hear a difference in tone between one section and another, trying to find a panel or doorway or something that would let him at the voice, and found nothing. And that was even more than enraging. Roger shook his fist at the wall. “I’m going to get you!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice, as calm and monotonous as ever.

“This is ridiculous,” wailed Roger. “Can’t you see it’s ridiculous?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh, shut up with your yeses and noes,” Roger snapped. “If you can’t say anything useful, don’t say anything at all.” He paced around the room, smoldering with helpless rage and growing resentment. Stopping by the window, he looked out again at the city. It looked, he thought, like a set for a play about Buck Rogers. And not a very well-designed set at that. No symmetry at all, and a color scheme that very rapidly grew boring. Gold and silver and black, that was all, endlessly repeated. Far away, he could see tiny movement, but couldn’t make sense out of it at all, couldn’t say for sure whether he was seeing the movement of people or automobiles or what. And even with-his forehead pressed to the glass or whatever it was, he couldn’t see down to street-level at the base of tills building.

He had to think. He had to figure out some way to get back to 1960 and his own life in his own world. What he’d seen of this particular segment of the future so far hadn’t endeared him to 2138. He would much prefer his own bug-farm of an apartment in the Village, where the walls at least kept a discreet silence and the bed rested firmly upon the floor.

The voice had said that he could go home, and that he could have whatever he wanted, but that he couldn’t go home now. Well, when could he go home? That seemed like a sensible enough question, so he asked it. “When can I go home?”

“When you want to,” said the voice.

“I want to now,” said Roger immediately. “Can I go home now?”

“No.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” shouted Roger. “Round and round and round, you’re driving me out of my mini What’s the purpose of all this?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“But there is a purpose?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“When I know the purpose,” said Roger carefully, “can I go home?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Well. Good. At last we’re getting somewhere, I hope. Now, how do I find out what the purpose is?”

“By asking me,” said the voice. “Poppycock,” snorted Roger. “I’ve asked you half a dozen times already, and you never say anything more than, ‘Restricted’. If you think I’m going to go—”

Struck by a sudden thought, Roger stopped talking but left his mouth open. He tilted his head to one side, put the index finger of his right hand on his cheekbone, and studied the thought. Carefully, he phrased his next question. “Do you mean I am to ask you questions that will help me figure out for myself what the purpose of my being here is?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Like Twenty Questions,” said Roger. “You can’t mean it. You brought me all the way from December 3, 1960, just to play a question-and-answer game?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Now that,” said Roger firmly, “is the most absurd idea I’ve ever run across. What possible good can it do the people of 2138 to bring me all the way here from December 3, 1960, to play Twenty Questions with a mechanical machine?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

Roger, whose question had been rhetorical, was thrown into momentary confusion by the answer. Once he’d straightened it all out, he said, “All right, then. I’ll play the silly game. Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

“Question incomplete,” said the voice.

“I don’t see what your people hope to gain from this,” said Roger. “They do hope to gain something, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“What?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh blast!” swore Roger. “If you say ‘Restricted’ once more, you disembodied monstrosity, I promise you I will break through that wall some way and tear you into so many pieces you’ll look like an Erector set. Do you hear me?”

The voice said, “Yes.”

Roger took a deep breath and held it. It would be such a pleasant relief to go berserk, to rant and rave and kick things and hit faces and break prized possessions. But he couldn’t do it. There were no faces to hit and no prized possessions to break, and he had the feeling he would get the worst of any kick delivered to a fluoryl plastic wall.

The thing was, he told himself, it was patently possible to think one’s way out of this mess. The voice had as much as said so. As soon as Roger figured out for himself what he was doing here, he could go home again. It all sounded rather senseless, but he could only assume that the people who had arranged this had had some sensible motive in mind, and go on from there.

The first thing to do was get calm, and stay calm. Calm and analytical and unemotional, asking, searching, probing, intensive questions, backing this monotoning mechanical slowly but inevitably into the final corner, where at last he would have to Tell All.

Fine. That was definitely the way to do it. Roger folded his arms, took a stance, and glared firmly at the wall. It was time to start asking questions.

What questions? He said it aloud. “What questions?”

“Question incomplete,” said the voice.

Roger gritted his teeth. Calm, he told himself. You’ll never get anywhere losing your temper.

He wished, all at once, that he had done more reading in science fiction. Not that that would have done much good anyway. In this situation, it would be like being murdered and wishing you’d read more detective stories.

He had to think this through, coldly and logically. What did he know so far? He knew that he had been transported, through a time machine, from December 3, 1960, to August 14, 2138. He knew he had been transported for a definite purpose. He knew that it was up to him to find out what that purpose was, and that he could only find out by asking questions of his mechanical.

He had a sudden thought “Is the purpose of my being here,” he asked, “to discover what the purpose of my being here is?”

The voice hesitated. “Repeat, please,” it said doubtfully.

Roger tried, then tried again, and made it the second time. “Am I here to find out why I’m here?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger beamed with relief. “Eureka!” he cried. He leaped onto the bed, composed himself with arms folded across his chest, and announced, “Send me home.”

Nothing happened.

Roger opened one eye, from the corner of which he balefully surveyed the golden wall. “There’s more?”

“Yes.”

“More,” repeated Roger. He closed the eye again, and thought. These people wanted something from him. At least, it seemed that way. He thought he’d better ask, to make sure. “Do the people who brought me here want something from me?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the voice.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” complained Roger. “This is over a hundred years in the future. The people here must know everything I could possibly know, and lots more.” He opened both eyes, “Mustn’t they?”

“No,” said the voice.

“No?”

“No”

“Oh. You mean they’ve lost something, or forgotten something?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Like the secrets of the Pyramids,” reflected Roger. “How they closed the door and piled the rocks up, or whatever the secrets of the Pyramids were.” He ruminated, then sat up to ask, “Well, why don’t you just ask me, then? I’d tell you, if I knew.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said the voice.

“You’ve tried?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m not the first one. Uh, I’m not the first one. Oh, blast it, all right, am I the first one?

“No,” said the voice.

“Why did you pick me in particular?” Roger asked, struck by the sudden thought that there couldn’t possibly be any answer that made sense.

“No,” said the voice.

That one set Roger back a bit, until he remembered what question he’d asked. But this seemed to be the answer to some other question. Unless — “You mean you didn’t pick me in particular?”

“Yes.”

Another sorting out, and Roger finally had it straight. “I was picked at random,” he told himself. “By chance.” Somehow, that made it all seem much much worse.

He sank into thought, meditatively tapping his fingernails against his front teeth, a practice which had cost him any number of roommates in the past but which seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the mechanical voice. “They want me to guess what it is they’ve lost,” he said aloud. “There must be a reason for their doing things this way. On the other hand, maybe there isn’t. They’ve tried before, other ways. Maybe they’re just trying anything they can think of.” He looked at the wall. “Is that it?” he asked. “Are they trying different methods with different people, hoping sooner or later some method will work?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“How many times have they tried so far?”

“Seventeen,” said the voice.

“And they all failed?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the seventeen people you took before? After they failed, I mean.”

“They died,” said the voice.

Roger yipped. “Died! Good heavens, why?”

“Because they failed,” said the voice.

“Why, that’s terrible!” cried Roger. “None of those people did anything to you. That’s unfair and immoral and… and… and murderous, that’s what it is.” Roger folded his arms in determination. “And I’ll have nothing more to do with it,” he said.

The voice made no comment.

“I suppose you’ll murder me now,” said Roger hesitantly. He glanced at the wall. “Will you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well, if you think I’m going to sit here,” said Roger, bounding to his feet, “and wait for you to decide to murder me, you’re sadly mistaken.” He looked wildly around the room, and noticed the silver door again. “I’m leaving.” he said. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Bah,” said Roger. He advanced to the door and stood looking at it. There was no knob, but there was a depression in the surface, at waist-height, near the right edge. Roger touched the depression and pushed, and nothing happened. He tried to pull, and nothing happened. Then he pushed to the left, and the door slid back into the wall.

Roger stood looking into the next room. It was exactly like the one he was now standing in, except that there was another door in the opposite wall, rather than a window. Otherwise, everything was the same, the color scheme, the bed, the bedside table and the calendar-clock.

Roger sourly surveyed the room, and a dirty suspicion came to him. “Is there another room like this beyond that next door?” he asked.

Two voices answered, one from each room, and both of them said, “Yes.”

“And another one beyond that?”

“Yes,” said the voices.

“The window, then,” said Roger. He pushed the door closed again, and strode to the window. Experimental prodding and pushing and pulling demonstrated to him that the window wouldn’t open. And he already knew it wouldn’t break.

He was a prisoner. The door and window had made it seem less like a prison, but they had turned out to be frauds. He could go nowhere.

“I want to go home!” he shouted all at once. “I’m sick of this!”

No answer.

“Seventeen people,” muttered Roger. “They all failed. Why should you expect me to succeed? It just isn’t fair. Besides, what could I possibly know that the people of this time don’t know?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh, shut up! Here. Look at this window, look at this floor. We couldn’t build anything like this in my time. Look at that city out there. The New York in my time is greasy and grimy and dirty, not like this at all. And we could never make a bed that hovers eighteen inches off the floor.”

He picked up the calendar-clock, to put it back on the table where it belonged, and noticed that it bore no marks as a result of being tossed around by Roger and the window. “Fluoryl plastic, I suppose,” he mumbled. “Looks brand new, but it might be twenty or thirty years old, the way it takes punishment.” He looked up. “How old is this?”

“One hundred and twelve years,” said the voice.

“A hundred and twelve years old?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fantastic.” Roger looked at the calendar-clock, which seemed so brand new, and set it down on the bedside table. “How about the bed?” he asked. “How old is that?”

“Ninety-seven years,” said the voice.

“That old? What, have you given me nothing but antiques?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Why?”

“Restricted,” said the voice. “Restricted? Now, why on earth should that be restricted?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh, do be quiet a minute. Sometimes, I’m asking myself questions, and you don’t have to answer. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t answer.” Roger frowned. “Now,” he said, “the answer must lie somewhere in this stuff that you call restricted. So the thing to do is ask you lots of questions, and whenever you say, ‘restricted’, write down that question, and pretty soon all the questions will add up to an answer. I hope.”

He looked over at the wall. “May I have paper and pencil?” he asked “Yes,” said the voice.

Roger waited, but nothing happened. “Oh,” he said. “I see. Were on an Easter-egg hunt. Is there pencil and paper in this room?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Under the bed?”

“No.”

Roger looked around, spied the bedside table, and said, “Ah hah!” He fingered the table until he found the drawer he knew must be in there, and took out the pen and notebook. He sat down on the edge of the bed, opened the notebook, and wrote “Antiques.” Then he looked up at the wall. “What about the room?” he asked. “Is that an antique, too?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“How old is this building?”

“One hundred and twenty-one years,” said the voice.

“Is it the oldest building in New York?”

“No.”

“The youngest?”

“No.”

“How old is the youngest building In New York?”

The voice hesitated, as though checking the facts, and said, “Ninety-eight years.”

Roger blinked. “Ninety-eight years!” He was suddenly excited, sure that he was on the trail. “You’ve forgotten how to build things,” he shouted. “That’s it, that’s it! Everything here was built or manufactured generations ago, and now you’ve all forgotten how, and you want me to tell you how. Isn’t that it?”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger, about to go into an impromptu dance, faltered and sagged. “No?” he echoed hollowly.

“No,” said the voice.

Roger said four unprintable words, at the top of his voice, and kicked the bed. That hurt, so he sat down, calmed himself, picked up the pen and notebook and decided to try some other line of questioning.

What about the seventeen people? He could ask questions about them, maybe. “Were the other seventeen all from 1960?” he asked.

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh. Well, were they all from New York?”

“No.”

“Were they all from the United States?”

“No.”

“Oh, balderdash! No, no, no, all the time no, its enough to drive a body to distraction! Were they all from the Twentieth Century, at least, for pity’s sake?”

“Yes,” said the imperturbable voice.

“Well! At last. Why were they all from the Twentieth Century?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Hah,” said Roger, and made a quick notation. “What you’ve lost or forgotten,” he said. “Can I assume it was something that was discovered in the Twentieth Century?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well, perfected in the Twentieth Century?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Hm-m-m,” said Roger, making another notation. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century. You mean a machine, or something like that?”

“No”

“Not a machine. Hm-m-m.” Roger stroked his chin, where he had never successfully grown a beard. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Not a machine.” He had always liked charades and guessing games and word games of all sorts, and was now in the swing of it, the unusual circumstances and the hinted-at dire consequences of failure alike forgotten.

“A lot of politics in the Twentieth Century,” he told himself. “Maybe one of the political theories.” He looked over at the wall. “One of the political theories, is that what you’re looking for?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Nothing political,” reflected Roger. “I wish I knew the categories. Let’s see, it must have something to do with the fact that all the buildings are old. And are all the machines and manufactured things old, too? Like the bed and clock?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“That has something to do with it,” said Roger assuredly. “And, come to think of it, so has this question-answer business, one way or another. By the way, how old is the time machine that brought me here?”

“Just one hundred years old exactly,” said the voice.

“And how long ago did you start kidnaping people from the Twentieth Century?”

“Eight years ago.”

“And I’m the absolute first one who’s been put through this Twenty Questions routine?”

“Yes.”

“I take it that with the other seventeen, you asked the questions and they gave the answers, and the answere weren’t the right ones, so you’ve decided to turn it around and see if it works better this way. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“I don’t see why you have to murder people for failing,” said Roger. “Why do you?”

“It gives them incentive,” said the voice.

“Incentive,” repeated. Roger, and his eyes suddenly widened. “Incentive!” he cried. “But it didn’t give them incentive enough, did it?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t the right kind of problem for a Twentieth Century man, isn’t that it?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you’re trying this different method with me. You’re looking for a problem that suits Twentieth Century man. Right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger nodded emphatically. “Of course. That’s the whole point. You want to see a Twentieth Century man solving a problem. Why? Because that’s what you’ve forgotten.” He beamed, smacked his right fist into his left palm, and strode up and down the room like a successful pirate on the top deck of a freshly-captured brig. “Now listen,” he said briskly. “This is a question, and a complicated one, and I don’t want you to answer till I’m finished. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“For thousands of years,” said Roger, “people lived lives almost totally devoid of change. Major changes, in politics or economics or society or whatever, took tens or hundreds of years. Changes in knowledge took as long or longer. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century, though, things were suddenly speeded up. Changes came more rapidly, knowledge increased by leaps and bounds, age-old problems in almost every field were solved. By the Twentieth Century, Man was even going out looking for problems to solve. From a creature which resisted change, which believed that its own order of things was the only possible order — like Aristotle convinced that the city state was the last word in government — Man became a creature searching for change, driving after change, to the point where sometimes he was shouting, ‘Change for change’s sake!’ Right so far?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“All right,” said Roger. He couldn’t keep still, he was pacing back and forth, waving his arms and nodding his head vigorously as he spoke, feeling more powerful and confident than he had ever felt before in his life. He was, after all, a representative of the Twentieth Century. And, if his guess was right, the Twentieth Century had turned out to be Man’s Golden Age after all. It was enough to make anyone feel strong and proud.

“Mankind,” declaimed Roger, “is like a pool of water. For thousands of years, it lies placid, changed only by the slow unnoticeable effects of rain and evaporation. Then something — the scientific method or the Industrial Revolution or the opening of the Western Hemisphere or whatever — something dropped a pebble into the pool, and it rippled and changed all over its surface. Political ideologies came up from everywhere. Scientific theories sprang into life. Diseases were conquered, machines invented, philosophies coined.”

Roger stopped, struck a pose, and raised one emphatic finger. “But,” he said firmly, “it could not last. The ripples would have to die down. The energy for change would have to burn itself out. By the Twentieth Century, that energy was at its peak. A hundred years later, the energy was gone.”

He whirled to face the wall. “Am I right?” he demanded.

“You are right,” said the voice.

“There is a difference between a field lying fallow,” said Roger, suddenly full of allegory,” and a field burned-out and overrun with weeds. Man could not go back to what he had been before the stone was cast into the pool, because now he had the example of the Twentieth Century to show him what he could and should be. We in my time had expected Man to have seeded the stars by now, to have finished the conquering of disease and old age, to have perfected his science and his politics and his human relations.” He pointed an accusing finger at the wall. “But you haven’t You’ve run down, you’ve stagnated. Mankind got only so far, and then stopped like an unwound watch. That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve stagnated.”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“A different kind of stagnation from that of the centuries preceding the Eighteenth. You’ve learned nothing new in the last hundred years, have you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“You haven’t gone out to the stars, have you? You haven’t solved the problems of sound government, you haven’t progressed in science or human relations. No. You’ve stopped, and now you’re sliding downhill. The peoples of the Southern Hemisphere are moving across the equator to conquer you, aren’t they? And ancient diseases, once wiped out, are reappearing. Population is growing smaller every year, with fewer and fewer births and more and more suicides, because life has become so essentially meaningless. You can no longer move forward, but it is no longer sufficient to stand still. Am l right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Of course I am,” said Roger. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so completely sure of himself, so totally in control. “And that’s why you steal people from the Twentieth Century. Because they still have the energy for change, and you want to find out how to get it for yourself. You’ve asked them straight out, and they couldn’t give you any answer that would satisfy you. You’ve probably tortured one or two of them, and still got nowhere. You’ve undoubtedly vivisected a couple, looking for the progress-spark the way the ancient doctors searched for the soul, and you haven’t found a thing. So this time you gave your Twentieth Century man a problem to solve, and told yourselves that you’d learn how to do it by watching me. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“And have you learned anything?”

“No,” said the voice. “The process of your thinking is not understandable.”

“Still,” said Roger, “I’d’ve solved the problem. So now you can send me back to my own time. Right?”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger frowned. “Why not? Oh, wait, never mind. I see. You won’t let me go home until I’ve also solved your problem. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Simplicity itself,” said Roger. He bestowed upon the wall a superior smirk. “Stop running to the Twentieth Century for help,” he said, “and stand on your own two feet. It’s the only way. Now send me home.” And he lay down on the bed.

“Same answer,” said the voice, “given by the other seventeen. Answer unsatisfactory.”

Roger sat bolt upright. “Unsatisfactory? But it’s the only answer!” The silence following that statement was suddenly ominous, and Roger remembered the voice’s laconic answer concerning the fate of the previous seventeen: “They died.”

“Wait… wait… wait a minute now,” said Roger hastily. He jumped from the bed and backed away toward the window. “Don’t do anything, now,” he told the wall.

He waited, looking apprehensively from wall to door and back. As the seconds collected into minutes and the voice didn’t do anything, and nothing came through the door, he gradually calmed. “That isn’t the answer,” he whispered to himself. “There must be another one. There must be another one.” With sudden doubt, he squinted at the wall. “Is there another one?”

“It is assumed,” said the voice, “that there is an answer, and that the progress of the Twentieth Century is based upon it.”

“Assumed,” echoed Roger. He tried to think, and absolutely nothing happened. “How would I know?” he asked himself, and the voice, unbidden, answered, “You are a product of that time.”

“Yes, but I’m a designer. I don’t know anything about science or progress or anything like that. All I know is designing. What you need is a scientist, or a sociologist, or a—”

He stopped, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe,” he whispered. “Maybe, just maybe.” He looked at the wall again, and asked, “This search you’re making. Who’s actually behind it, the people or the machines?”

“The machines,” said the voice. “The people are too self-satisfied to worry, is that it?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Then I know what you should do.” He said it with great confidence and assurance, though he had no idea whether he was right or wrong. “I have one more use for your time machine,” he said. “After you send me home, I mean. There’s somebody else you should bring here. Then you should destroy the time machine, and make it impossible to build another one. So he’ll know he won’t be able to get back, he’ll just have to build a new life for himself here.” And also, he thought, so you can’t come get me if this doesn’t work. Aloud, he added, “Then you should put yourselves completely in this man’s hands. All the machines should do exactly as he tells them. Let him know he’s boss, the minute he gets here. Got that?”

“Yes,” said the voice, and somehow the monotone monosyllable managed to sound doubtful.

“What you people need,” said Roger positively, “is a leader. Look at the Twentieth Century. It was the time of leaders, of mass movements and conflicting ideologies. Every leader had a bunch of theories for how to make human society work. All the Stir and commotion that was brought on by this was what forced change and progress. The people of the Twenty-second Century don’t have anything to get all stirred up over. They don’t have a leader, somebody to give them a reason to look for change, somebody who’ll push them toward change whether—” He faltered, since he’d been going to say, “whether they like it or not,” and had realized just in time that that wasn’t what the machines had in mind. Instead, he finished, “they fully understand his methods or not.”

For the first time, the voice spoke without being asked a question. “We had decided,” it said, “that the change would have to be made within the people of our own time. We are looking for a way to make them similar—”

“I know, I know,” interrupted Roger. “That’s where you’re making your mistake. They are similar already. You’ve had seventeen failures. Don’t you see what that means? The people of my century are exactly the same as the people of yours. The only difference is that they have leaders. Without a leader, they act just the way the people of this time do.”

“Of course,” said the voice. It had apparently given up the practice of speaking only when asked questions. “The failure of the other seventeen puzzled us. We hadn’t expected it from Twentieth Century men. Do you have a particular leader in mind?”

“Certainly,” said Roger, though he didn’t. He thought rapidly. A sociologist? A physicist? A—

All at once, he smiled. “I have solved your problem,” he said with finality. “And mine.” And everybody else’s, he added to himself. “I don’t think he speaks English, though,” Roger said. “He speaks Russian. But I can positively assure you that there will be a great change here if you bring him.”

“That’s all right,” said the voice.